Country guide · Denmark

Denmark asks an employee for no odometer at all, and a sole trader for four readings per trip

The document is a voucher, not a logbook

Danish practice is addressed at the bogføringsbilag — the accounting voucher behind the payment — rather than at a running log kept by the driver. The instrument is BEK nr. 173 af 13/03/2000, Bekendtgørelse om rejse- og befordringsgodtgørelse, and Skattestyrelsen's own Den juridiske vejledning still states it as the operative rule in its 2026-2 edition, so the 2000 text is current rather than merely uncontradicted.

A second bekendtgørelse does a different job and gets confused with it constantly: BEK nr. 1333 af 20/11/2025 sets the rates and the company-car bar. Two numbers, two purposes; quoting one for the other's content is the standard mistake.

The seven items

BEK 173 § 2 stk. 2, in the order it lists them:

• The recipient's name, address and CPR number
• The business purpose of the driving
• The date
• The destination, with any intermediate stops (delmål)
• The number of kilometres driven
• The rates applied
• The calculation of the allowance

And one thing that is not a field at all: the employer must be able to show it checked the claim before paying it. "Arbejdsgiverens kontrol er sket inden udbetalingen" — a check performed afterwards does not cure it.

Denmark inverts the pattern

Everywhere else the company car is the strict regime, because the record exists to rebut a benefit. Denmark makes the self-employed filer the strict one:

• Self-employed, own car — the odometer at the start of the year, at the start and end of every business trip, and at year end, plus the date, the purpose and the destinations.
• Employee, own car — the seven-item voucher above. No odometer among them.
• Firmabil — no tax-free allowance may be paid at all. BEK 1333 § 11: "Der kan ikke udbetales skattefri befordringsgodtgørelse, når arbejdsgiveren har stillet firmabil til rådighed for den ansatte, medmindre det dokumenteres, at kørslen er foretaget i den ansattes egen bil." And "Der kan normalt ikke stilles krav om, at den ansatte fører en egentlig kørebog" — no logbook is required of that driver either.

That last one is a prohibition rather than a gap. There is no figure to look up, and typing a custom rate in does not create one.

3,94 kr to 20 000 km, then 2,28 — per employer

The threshold is counted per employer, not per person: BEK 1333 § 10, "gælder kun for den enkelte arbejdsgiver." Two jobs are two thresholds. Skattestyrelsen applies the same split to a sole trader's own deduction — its English page and form 04.023 both print it — so the split is not employees-only even though the rule that states it is.

The 60-day rule, which has nothing to do with how you drove

LL § 9 B stk. 1 litra a covers driving between home and a workplace "i indtil 60 arbejdsdage inden for de forudgående 12 måneder". Past day 60 that workplace is fast, and the same drive becomes private. SKAT's worked case is a filer at 62 days whose godtgørelse for the last two was taxable.

Five things about it come from JV C.A.4.3.3.3.1, and four of them a careful reading of the bare statute gets wrong:

• One counter per workplace, not one counter per person.
• Direct home to workplace only. A mid-day hop between two customers is litra b and counts for neither of them.
• A day can spend two counters — the day's first trip and its last trip both move one.
• Length is irrelevant, and gaps neither count nor heal. Weekends, holidays and sick days are not counted and do not interrupt the period. Only 60 consecutive working days away from that workplace start it over (stk. 2).
• A change of employer starts a new period. A temporary layoff does not.

Five years, and not in a tax act

Bogføringsloven, LOV nr. 700 af 24/05/2022, § 12 stk. 1 — five years from the end of the financial year the material relates to. The shortest period of the twenty-one countries here, and a reader searching ligningsloven or skatteforvaltningsloven for it finds nothing, because it lives in the Erhvervsministeriet's bookkeeping act; Skattestyrelsen adopts it as its own in JV A.B.3.1.3.

The duty binds the bogføringspligtige — the employer paying the godtgørelse, or a sole trader — and not the employee whose voucher it is. Denmark draws no distinction between paper and electronic, and § 9 stk. 3 requires a correction to leave both the original content and the change visible.

What failure costs

Not a reduced deduction. Missing or insufficient documentation makes the whole allowance ordinary taxable salary — a reclassification, applied to the payment rather than to the shortfall.

Why an app rather than a notebook

Nothing above requires software; the seven items fit on a form. What software changes is which of them survives a year. Nobody loses the kilometres or the rate. What goes missing is the exact date, the destination of one of two hundred visits, and the business purpose written in your own words rather than reconstructed in March from a calendar.

DriveHub records each drive in the background and asks afterwards which were business. The report carries all seven items — the name, address and CPR number in the identity block, your own wording for the purpose, the date, the destination, the kilometres, the rate and the calculation — and it counts the 20 000 km threshold per employer rather than as one pooled total. It also counts the 60 working days per workplace and prints the date the count starts from, and it never tells you a route is still inside the 60 days: a day you worked without driving is invisible to it, so the count it can produce is a floor.

What it does not print is the delmål — an intermediate stop. A stop long enough to matter becomes its own recorded trip, and a shorter one is not a place; the report says so on its face rather than carrying a column that is empty on every row.

This page states what the bekendtgørelse itself says, and numbers it so you can check. It is not tax advice. It can't account for your circumstances. Where money is involved, ask your revisor — and bring the bilag.